From the Boston Globe:

Getting Closer to the Truth About the Death of JFK

Author: By Max Holland

Date: FRIDAY, September 18, 1998

Page: A27

Section: Op-Ed Page

For the federal government, and all Americans, it has been a long,
torturous road from the 6th floor of 411 Elm St. in Dallas to the second floor
of 600 E St. in Washington. But now these two red brick buildings are
irrevocably connected in history as the federal government writes the last
chapter of its part in the tragedy which, 35 years ago, struck dumb an entire
nation.

Four-eleven Elm Street is more commonly known by the name of its former
tenant, the Texas School Book Depository Company. The nondescript building at
600 E St. has no such claim on the national consciousness, though over time
the work of one tenant there will do as much or more to shape history -- if
reason ever prevails over our paranoia with respect to the assassination of
President Kennedy.

For the past four years, five presidential appointees have labored almost
anonymously, yet tirelessly, in Suite 208 to make public every significant
artifact and document related to Nov. 22, 1963, and its aftermath. Within a
matter of days the Assassination Records Review Board, as the appointees are
collectively known, will publish its final report and shut down for good on
Sept. 30.

Unlike every previous federal effort, however, the review board will not
assert a single conclusion, in keeping with its mandate. It will report only
what it managed to find. It's up to others to make sense out of the
four-million-page collection, assembled at the cost of $8 million to the
taxpayers.

While there are 10,000 stories in those documents, including many
peripheral to the assassination, it is not premature to ask how, if at all,
they affect our understanding of the emotional and political Grand Canyon that
opened beneath our gaze in 1963.

Many of the documents have lain open for months already. Whether by
accident or design, the review board has shed new light on the genuine Rosetta
stone to that weekend in Dallas, namely, the response of Robert F. Kennedy to
his brother's murder.

The version heretofore propagated was congenial to the Camelot metaphor,
though independent of it. Roughly described, the preferred account has been
that Robert Kennedy, attorney general at the time, was so profoundly
devastated by the loss that he paid little heed to who was responsible for the
assassination. ``Jack's gone and nothing is going to bring him back'' was
RFK's refrain whenever he was intermittently pressed on his apparent
uninterest in the Warren Commission's investigation.

The truth turns out to be considerably more complicated and interesting.
Through the review board's efforts, you can piece together as never before the
genuine, underlying reason for Robert Kennedy's uncharacteristic response. His
pain was compounded by guilt. Because what occurred in Dallas was roughly what
Robert Kennedy hoped and planned to have happen in Havana.

While a dozen documents retrieved and declassified help to build this case,
the single most striking is an Oval Office memorandum of conversation dated
Jan. 4, 1975, almost 12 years after Dallas. There are only three men in the
room that Saturday morning as the discussion begins: Gerald Ford, president
for a mere five months; Henry Kissinger, who held unprecedented power as
Ford's secretary of state and national security adviser, and Brent Scowcroft,
the note-taker (and later a national security adviser in his own right). The
urgent, 9:40 a.m. meeting was called because the season of inquiry spawned by
Watergate had not exhausted itself. But now the target was not a president but
the sacrosanct Central Intelligence Agency, which was hanging in the fire
after press reports of ``massive'' wrongdoing.

Kissinger is conveying to Ford the gist of his just-concluded breakfast
conversation with former CIA Director Richard Helms, who had been summoned
from Tehran to brief the White House about the alleged misdeeds. ``What is
happening,'' Kissinger tells the president, ``is worse than in the days of
McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, and not
operations.

``Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they
come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the
operation on the assassination of Castro.''

The suggestion has already been made (this memo was opened in July) that
the document does not really mean what it states in plain English, that it
must be carefully put into context. Yet it is precisely the context that makes
this document dispositive. Unless the White House could devise a mechanism,
the CIA's days as an instrument of presidential power were numbered. But the
president had to have all the facts to act effectively. It is inconceivable
that Richard Helms told Henry Kissinger anything less than the full, hard
truths as Helms knew them and as Kissinger needed to know them. As Allen
Dulles once explained the need-to-know principle, ``I would tell the president
of the United States anything . . . I am under his control. He is my boss.''

This truth about Robert Kennedy's bottomless melancholy, which never fully
lifted during the reminder of his life, has at least three implications. For
one, it helps explain his uninterest in the Warren Commission. Months before
that federal panel presented its conclusion -- indeed, probably no later than
Christmas 1963 -- he had reached the unavoidable conclusion, relying on his
own crack investigators: Oswald, though enamored of Castro, had acted alone
and Jack Ruby was a self-appointed vigilante. None of RFK's bete noires -- not
Castro, Jimmy Hoffa or the Cosa Nostra -- had anything to do with the Dallas
murders. Consequently the Warren Commission was not going to tell him anything
he did not already know.

Conspiracy books usually treat John and Robert Kennedy as innocent babes who would not have thought about dirty tricks -- much less assassination plots -- against Castro. But the reality is very different. See:

Indeed, in some respects the Warren Commission's investigation represented
a threat, first to the Kennedy administration's image and then to RFK's own
political viability. That is the only conceivable reason why Kennedy, when
specifically asked by Earl Warren, did not share his knowledge of anti-Castro
plotting with the Warren Commission. One is left with the bleak, sobering fact
that Robert Kennedy and other high-ranking officials, no less than the CIA,
realized that the national interest (as apart from the truth) would not be
served by having the Warren Commission delve into and probably expose the
plotting.

Rock-solid intelligence proved Castro had nothing to do with Oswald.
Therefore, whatever the US government was trying to do was irrelevant to the
issue of Oswald's culpability. The same need-to-know principle that compelled
full disclosure in 1975 dictated in 1964 that the chief justice and Warren
Commission staff be kept in the dark insofar as possible. And so they were.

Robert Kennedy's anguish and predicament turns out to be the metaphor for
understanding the aftermath of the assassination. The entire, vast apparatus
of the federal government had been put in motion to find out who had murdered
a president. But once the facts pointed overwhelmingly in one and only one
direction, the truth was portioned out to protect individuals and
bureaucracies.

It's not the civic portrait (a government of laws, not men) depicted by
high school textbooks. But it is the legacy left behind by the Assassination
Records Review Board, and it ought to shift the entire axis of public
understanding. Will Americans ever come to terms with this portrait of
imperfection, and understand that for all the omissions, their government did
not fail in its one supreme duty -- which was to tell the people who had
killed their president.